The Indian Express, March 10, 1990

"Nilita Vachani's 'Eyes of Stone' creates a depth of feeling, a poetry about human existence, out of its sharp close-up of one family's life in rural Keriya, at the far end of the great cultural divide.

'Eyes of Stone' starts off as a film where a sociologist probes into the rituals of possession by spirits in rural Rajasthan and the patterns of exorcism practiced by allegedly possessed women, through their prostrations at the twin shrines of the Bhankya Mata in the bush-deserts of Bhilwara.

However, what is remarkable about Nilita'a first-time is that it soon transcends from a specific subject study into a distinctly candid, incredibly honest portrayal of the tugs and pulls of everyday life for a 19-year-old mother of two, her parental household and her erratic truck driver husband.

The stark intimacy of the family's dialogue with the camera and the subtle manner in which the dimensions of their world come together are a tribute both to the filmmakers and the honesty and openness with which Shanta and her family discuss their most personal relationships enabling the film to transcend from the commonness of a low-income household into the realm of a significant documentation about life as it is in one little corner of the world.

I don't think there is anything yet to match this film in Indian cinema in terms of the real life portraiture of a rural family. Eyes of Stone is perhaps our best film in the Cinema Verité tradition. It is the intellectual intimacy between the filmmakers and their subjects, both Shanta's larger family and the anonymous mass of people congregating at the Bhankya Mata shrine that gives this film its human warmth, its major sociological insights and its brilliant cinematic quality.

For director Nilita Vachani and cinematographer, Vangelis Kalambakas, Eyes of Stone is a very impressive debut and it will be of tremendous interest both to sociologists studying traditional Indian exorcism of spirits and to those attempting to fathom the social fabric of rural India, specially in terms of the influences that a somewhat remote industrial society has on villagers."

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